What do I think or get up to as an Oracle Professional, UKOUG Volunteer, ACE Director?
These are my personal views

Sunday, 21 June 2009

Oracle HQ

Having arrived at Redwood on Thursday evening, I went straight to bed, 20 hours after I left home. It was quite an uneventful trip except 2 quick airport stories. First when landing at Newark my plane was held for a long time in the air and then diverted to a different terminal. As we taxied around the airport there were lots of camera crews, everyone thought it must have been a plane crash, but actually it was a Continental Flight from Brussels were the pilot died. The at San Francisco, we were coming into land on a beautiful early evening and along side us, really close was another plane, quite frightening for me but no one else seemed worried, I have never seen this before despite having been to SFO many times, turns out they have parallel runways.Anyway I digress, the visit to Redwood was for the ACE Director day, and the best way to tell you what happened is to say log onto www.twitter.com and search for #ACED. We saw a lot of Fusion Middleware 11g but of course we were under non disclosure agreements until after the launch on July 1st.

It was a full on day, starting at 8.15 am and finishing just before 6pm, I really enjoyed the day, as my field is Apps and Fusion Apps I thought very little would be of value to me but actually I learnt a lot and did get to see where things fit in. I especially liked the sessions where the speaker came armed with slides but actually only used them to answer questions. Much more interactive and way beyond just a polished marketing script.

Then it was all on a coach for the 90 minute drive to Monterey for ODTUG, and again this was a great opportunity to speak to more of my fellow ACE Directors. On arrival at Monterey ODTUG had a welcome VIP reception for us and the registration was all done bar the credit card swipe. Excellent and thanks ODTUG.